LOS ANGELES CITYWIDE HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT Context: Architecture and Engineering, 1850-1980 Theme: Mediterranean & Indigenous Revival Architecture, 1893-1948 Prepared for: City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning Office of Historic Resources November 2018 SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement Context: Architecture and Engineering/Mediterranean and Indigenous Revival Architecture, 1893-1948 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE 1 CONTRIBUTORS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 HISTORIC CONTEXT 4 SUB-THEME: MISSION REVIVAL, 1893-1948 6 SUB-THEME: SPANISH COLONIAL REVIVAL, 1912-1942 14 Single-Family Residential 15 Multi-Family Residential 17 Commercial and Industrial 22 Institutional 25 SUB-THEME: CHURRIGUERESQUE, 1915-1942 33 SUB-THEME: MONTEREY REVIVAL, 1929-1942 40 SUB-THEME: MEDITERRANEAN REVIVAL, 1918-1942 44 SUB-THEME: ROMANESQUE REVIVAL, 1918-1942 50 SUB-THEME: PUEBLO REVIVAL, 1915-1947 59 SUB-THEME: ADOBE REVIVAL, 1894-1948 63 MEDITERRANEAN AND SPANISH COLONIAL REVIVIAL RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS 67 City Historic Preservation Overlay Zones 67 SurveyLA Historic Districts 70 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 74 SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement Context: Architecture and Engineering/Mediterranean and Indigenous Revival Architecture, 1893-1948 PREFACE This theme is a component of Los Angeles’ citywide historic context statement and provides guidance to field surveyors in identifying and evaluating potential historic resources relating to Mediterranean and Indigenous Revival Architecture and associated styles. Refer to HistoricPlacesLA.org for information on designated resources associated with this theme as well as those identified through SurveyLA and other surveys. CONTRIBUTORS Daniel Prosser is a historian and preservation architect. He holds an M. Arch. from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University. Before retiring he was the Historic Sites Architect for the Kansas State Historical Society. This theme is largely based on early work developed for SurveyLA by Los Angeles-based architectural historian Leslie Heumann. INTRODUCTION The theme of Mediterranean and Indigenous Revival Architecture examines resources based on the historic architecture of Spain, Italy, and the Native American Southwest. This architecture shaped the buildings of early California and thereby left a heritage that came to be seen, from the 1890s through the 1940s, as an appropriate basis for a set of regional styles. The fundamental elements of these related styles appeared in the California missions built under Spanish rule from the 1770s through 1820s. These elements were white plastered walls, red clay tiled roofs, the use of the arch both individually and in groups as arcades, and the enclosed patio. These architectural elements employed a masonry construction based on adobe, or sun-dried brick, inherited from Native Americans. Reyner Banham, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, refers to this heritage as the “ancient entanglement” of the missions and notes how it was combined with additional elements taken directly from Spain, Italy, and the Native American Southwest to create a set of revivals that ranged from “the simplest stuccoed shed to fantasies of fully-fledged Neo-Churrigueresque.” The strength of this architecture comes from the fact that, according to Banham, “in Los Angeles it makes both ancestral and environmental sense.”1 This historic context looks at each of the revivals that made up this architecture, providing a summary of their defining characteristics and representative examples of different building types. All but one of the revivals are based on the concept of style. This is a collection of character-defining architectural features held in common. The examples provided are relatively pure, in that they consist primarily, if 1 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 27. Page | 1 SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement Context: Architecture and Engineering/Mediterranean and Indigenous Revival Architecture, 1893-1948 not exclusively, of the features of the style. In reality most resources encountered in the field are mixtures of styles, with at best features of one of the revivals predominating.2 The earliest of these styles was the Mission Revival. Beginning in the mid-1890s and lasting up to the First World War of 1917-1918, it grafted, in a relatively literal manner, exterior features of the California missions onto then-current building types. Following it, from the mid-1910s through the 1940s, was the Spanish Colonial Revival. This style went beyond reproducing surface features and incorporated massing, layout, and relationships to the landscape which were typical of both the California missions and their antecedents found in the Andalusia region of southern Spain. Of all the revivals, the Mission Revival and, in particular, the Spanish Colonial Revival were the most prolific. The two styles discussed next were less prolific variations on the Spanish Colonial Revival. The Churrigueresque was a more ornamented version of the relatively austere Spanish Colonial and typically limited in use to churches and to commercial buildings such as theaters and storefronts. The Monterey Revival, a strictly residential style limited to well-off suburban districts, incorporated elements of the two-story buildings found in the port of Monterey on the central California coast, in particular a second- floor cantilevered gallery extending across the front façade. Then examined are two styles originating in Italy, both of which had a degree of popularity for certain building types in the 1920s and 1930s. The Mediterranean Revival was common for residential and smaller institutional uses. It shared basic elements with the Spanish Colonial Revival, such as stuccoed walls and tiled roofs, but was generally less exuberant and more formal in its massing, and featured extended gardens rather than enclosed patios. The Romanesque Revival, modeled specifically on the medieval architecture of northern Italy, made use of brick rather than stucco and was particularly popular for churches and university buildings. Finally, there are two revivals which drew directly from Native American sources. The Pueblo Revival was modeled after the pueblos of New Mexico. As an architecture of the desert, it was not seen as particularly appropriate for more coastal Los Angeles, and examples are extremely rare. The other, the Adobe Revival, is actually a type of construction and not a style. While generally employing the Spanish Colonial Revival, it may be in any style. It too was limited in its use and found typically in the residential works of a handful of designers. The historic context ends with an examination of concentrations of residential resources in neighborhood settings, which comprise historic districts. The revivals, in particular the Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean, were used extensively in the creation of new residential subdivisions during the 1920s and early 1930s. Three factors explain the success of these revivals. First, they were flexible enough to fit the needs of many different building types. The Mission and especially the Spanish Colonial were commonly used for 2 For SurveyLA, field surveyors often identified more than one architectural style for a building, with one predominating. Page | 2 SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement Context: Architecture and Engineering/Mediterranean and Indigenous Revival Architecture, 1893-1948 residential, commercial, and institutional buildings of all sizes in all sorts of locations. Even industrial buildings made occasional use of their forms. The other styles were particularly well suited to specific building types, such as the Romanesque Revival for university campuses and the Monterey Revival for single-family residences. Second, the revivals could be executed in a number of different construction methods. The stucco exterior surfaces of all the styles, with the exception of the Romanesque, allowed for the use of three common methods. Stucco was applied to the traditional brick masonry of commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings. It was also applied to the balloon-framed wood structure typical of residential work through the use of wood or wire-mesh lath. Finally, stucco was applied to the poured-in-place concrete construction of larger institutional and commercial buildings. Third, the revivals were popular at precisely the time when the city was developing rapidly and requiring new buildings of all sorts. The styles coincided with the thirty-year period, from 1900 to 1930, when Los Angeles grew from 102,000 residents to 1,238,000.3 It was during this period that the automobile reshaped the urban landscape. The ability of the revivals, in particular the Spanish Colonial, to provide forms suitable to the emerging suburban setting accounted for their plentiful use in all types of auto- oriented structures, ranging from modest homes with adjacent garages to service stations and car dealerships. Evaluation Considerations This theme overlaps with many other SurveyLA themes, in that resources associated with those themes may be in the styles presented in this theme. There are some in which the styles of this theme are particularly prevalent: • Themes of Streetcar Suburbanization and Automobile Suburbanization, within the Residential Development and Suburbanization context • Sub-themes of the Bungalow Court and Courtyard Apartments, within the Multi-Family Residential Development theme • Theme